We were camping at the beach this weekend and my wife and kids really wanted to see the Mayweather / McGregor fight. We checked at all the local bars and none of them were showing the fights. One pretty bartender mentioned to me that it's crazy expensive to show the fights at a business, so I suggested that we all crash over to her place and we'd pay the PPV fee. That went over about as well as I had expected (not well).

The closest place we found to camp was a bar about 20 minutes away, and the cover was going to be $30 per person for my family of five (plus all the drinks).

I told my family that I was just as happy to miss the fights and have a nice evening at camp, but they were pretty disappointed. My oldest daughter asked me why we couldn't watch it in the trailer. "We have every convenience known to man and really cool TVs. Why can't we just watch it in the trailer?"

I explained to her that the cable isn't long enough to reach from the RV back to our house (200 miles away). She kept after me though, so I poked around at our technology to see what I could come up with.

I turned on the hotspot on my iPhone and connected to DirecTV on my laptop to see what the picture quality was like if I streamed over my slow phone. It was actually pretty good on my laptop. So I connected my laptop to our TV via HDMI to see what it looked like on the big screen. Again, pretty good.

So then I followed the Buy It Now link at DirecTV to see about buying the PPV, but it showed that they only supported viewing on televisions (no PC/Mac or mobile). Sad trombone.

I was able to buy it from UFC.com though.

I texted all my friends that we were camping with and told them that we would have the fights at camp.

We ended up having a huge potluck BBQ with our friends. One of the guys set up his big TV outside so we wouldn't have to all cram into my fiver to watch. Folks from other camps ended up joining us and we had a huge party.

I was pretty shocked that my little iPhone never lost connection and that we never burned through my data plan, even after streaming four hours of live TV.

I compare this to the time when I was about eight years old and my dad bought a nine inch 12v TV so that our whole neighborhood could drive up to Pismo and watch a blacked-out Rams game. We froze our butts off and could hardly see the action on that little screen. Times have changed.

Oh and we had fun with the power. I was going to run my gen, but it was too noisy where we were sitting. I have a 100' extension cord in a bucket that I almost never use. So we ran the cord from the TV to another guy's trailer three sites away and he ran his gen. It didn't bother anyone, because they were all in our space anyway.

Sad when our kids know more about this stuff then we do! Kudos Dave! My kids got a kick that I have my own wifi in the trailer so I can stream the movies from my old Mac Mini to the TV in the back or to their devices. Gets the job done and easier then trying to run cable to the back TV.